Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Everybody’s nice to her. Everybody’s walking on eggshells around her, treating her like glass. It’s been over a year, but still she’s treated like a precious work of art, like she could break at any moment. (Even Lassiter’s nice to her, hardly ever snapping, never shouting, never being snide or making condescending remarks.) It’s unsettling, but she can’t find the energy to complain about it, she just wants everyone to go away-away-away. She wants to be left alone, but when she gets home and finds herself, at last, blissfully solitary, that’s not right either.

Her place is quiet and empty and cold and too big and too small. It’s too tight, she’s choking, because she’s alone, alone, and that’s not how it’s supposed to be. She leaves, goes out, and tries to calm down. Her head - like her apartment - seems empty and all too full at the same time. She walks past the park two blocks down, because they used to have picnics there on lazy Sunday afternoons, past the coffee shop on the corner because they used to stop there and get lattes in the mornings. (He used to say that the lattes were explosions of foamy milky goodness, and she almost smiles at the memory.) Six blocks down and two streets over she finds her sanctuary, the only place in her neighbourhood she never took him. It’s a bookstore, the good old kind with a comfy chair in the back, surrounded by shelves, completely hidden from view.

She doesn’t cry here. She doesn’t cry at all, really, not since the funeral, when she sobbed and shook and cried hot tears into Lassiter’s suit jacket. (And why was it him that held her; Shawn’s parents were there, the Chief, Gus, why was it Lassiter that pulled her close and let her cry herself empty? It doesn’t matter, but sometimes she remembers it and it makes her awkward around him, makes her wonder if she ruined the jacket with her runny makeup.) Here, she sits quietly, trying not to remember but remembering still.

She remembers the case, all of it, in vivid detail, from the moment the Chief handed her the file, to Shawn going in first, sauntering lazily like he always did, because nobody expected a showdown, nobody expected a gun, nobody expected to see Shawn get hit and fall to the floor as though in slow motion. After that, after the sound of the gun going off, and Shawn jerking a little, his knees buckling, Juliet doesn’t remember.

It’s all a blur, running to him, trying to put pressure on the wound. Distantly, she can recall hearing the sound of another gun going off, the vibrations in the floorboards as another body falls heavily. She remembers muddily that the paramedics arrived and pried her away from Shawn. After that she remembers, through a haze, an arm around her shoulder, leading her to the car. She remembers white walls, and the drying blood on her hands and she remembers waiting.

She doesn’t remember the face of the doctor that told them he (he? or she?) was sorry, that Shawn hadn’t made it. She doesn’t remember how she got home, doesn’t remember the next day, or the one after that. She only remembers bits and pieces of the funeral. She knows she was out for two weeks after that, but she doesn’t have much of a recollection of the 336 hours that made up the fourteen days. There was a lot of toast-eating and staring into space. A lot of sleeping, certainly.

When she got back to work, she got the eggshell-treatment, and didn’t complain, because she felt fragile. (Sometimes she wonders if it might be easier just to break, but the thought scares her too badly to give it much space.) The hollow space inside her was aching with longing for messy hair, a cocky smile and kind eyes, longing for someone to sneak up behind her and whisper nonsensical compliments in her ear or unceremoniously drape themselves over her desk and vax lyrical about some stupid meaningless thing.

She’s taking detours on her way home, to avoid the Chinese place on Mitchell, and the pizza place on Maddison. She never goes to the boardwalk anymore, because she can’t bear to see the windows, where you can still, if you look closely, see the outlines spelling ‘Psych’, even though the office has been home to a tiny accounting firm for almost a year now. Gus is back in the pharmaceutical business full-time these days, she hardly ever sees him. Not that she makes an effort. That would require actually... Making an effort.

She doesn’t do that anymore, make an effort. Each day is twenty-four hours long. Eight of those hours are spent sleeping, twelve at work (and while Lassiter seems to appreciate that she’s working the same hours he is, sometimes he looks concerned, and she thinks he might be talking to the Chief about it) and the final four getting ready for work, eating, sometimes going to the gym. Lately, she likes it better at the shooting range, though, spending hours shooting a poor paper target to shreds. She doesn’t take the time to examine her motives.

It’s been over a year. She hasn’t had Chinese take-out or pizza or lattes or a picnic in the park for over a year. She doesn’t do any of the things she used to do with Shawn, because remembering him is hard. The only problem is that even when she doesn’t do the things that remind her of Shawn, she still remembers. She remembers their first almost-kiss, their first real kiss, and a hundred kisses after that. She remembers his voice, sleep-roughened and unbearably sexy in the mornings, his eyes mischieviously sparkling, his hands soft and warm against her skin. She remembers (but only sometimes, because this is the hardest memory of them all) that he loved her.